You can create skin layouts in pretty much any HTML style editor - or for that matter just using a text editor - do a google search for Notepad++ its a great text editor that understand some of the basics of markup.

The only advantage of using something like visual studio is that it helps you a little when editing .ascx based skin elements -- but yeah http://www.artisteer.com/ might be the best $45 you can spend if you have never done markup or skin style layouts - and it helps greatly will all the css elements for things like menu systems and styling that you would need to crunch manually in a notepad

Westa

Thank you all for your responses.  Sadly I'm finding DNN has some of the worst documentation in the history of CMS's.

http://www.theaccidentalgeek.com/post... - thank you for this link, however the creator never bothered to add a "next" link to the bottom and the top index didn't have links to take you to the next section. On top of that it was extremely hard to follow being that the specific features of DNN were buried in explaining how a site works. Then not to mention it was for DNN 5.x. So I dropped out on this one.

http://www.dnnsoftware.com/wiki/page/... - Thank you, but sadly this was the same tutorial as above.

http://www.artisteer.com/ - Thank you for the link, but I found Artisteer even more difficult than working with raw code. Attempting to delete all the default div's and other 'stuff' on their "blank" page was a pain in the butt on the graphical interface.

http://www.sublimetext.com/3 - Thank you for the link. This program looks amazing! Loving what I am seeing. I was wondering if I can tie the web page I am working on to the css file so if I change the name of a css style it will change in the htmls!? Just started using this and loving it so far.

 I think the biggest thing I need is the list of "tokens" and, the apparently more recent, "object ids". does anyone know where I can find the list for the tokens and object ids?